Current Events Portfolio

Post navigation

Henry Pendleton- Blog Post #5

During this past week Dianne Feinstein took the Senate floor as the Senate Intelligence Chairwoman in a fiery outrage accusing the Central Intelligence agency of spying on congress. She accused them of sabotaging efforts from Senate staffers to investigate the possibility of torture, such as water boarding from the CIA during the Bush administration. It said that the CIA both lied to the committee in charge of the investigation along with hacking the computers. The CIA’s internal report on their going-on’s and torture practices was accidently made available to the Feinstein and her Committee. After learning about their mistake they tried to fix it by hacking the staffers computers and stealing the incriminating documents back. This has been an on going trial since congress caught wind that there was a possibility that the Central Intelligence Agency might have been using water boarding as a technique to interrogate terrorists in the after math of 9/11

When Senator Feinstein had the floor she was quoted saying, “[The CIA] violated the separation-of-powers principals embodied in the United States Constitution.” Clearly stated in the CIA charter it says that any domestic spying is strictly forbidden and this incident falls clearly in to this category. I understand and support the fact that the Central Intelligence agency has a fair amount of leeway in foreign affairs to ensure the safety of the United States, and for national security there ongoing can be opaque and not very straightforward. But the entire system collapses the moment they start to not only spy domestically but on the government in which it is a part of. All trust is lost and the last thing we need is for everyone to be looking over his or her shoulders when the government direly needs to work smoothly.